MARCS Labs was established in 1999 and has grown to consist of over 70 academics, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, researchers, technical and support staff, and our members and collaborators come from across the globe. Since its inception, MARCS has developed a dynamic and vibrant research culture that has attracted researchers with common interests in auditory research.

Our Approach is based on experimental psychology; using our skills in behavioural and cognitive science, research design, statistical analysis, and computer programming we bring experimental manipulations and methodological rigour both to traditional areas of experimental psychology, and those less often studied in this manner, such as dance, mother-infant interaction, talking heads and many more.

The Focus which binds together what we do is auditory research. Speech and music are two auditory domains that are especially significant for humans for both promote communication and interaction as well as linguistic and social competence, so these are two of the major foci at MARCS. Moreover, audition involves information spread over time so the study of audition implicitly requires an understanding of the temporal dimension. This takes us into the analysis of movement and rhythm over time, for example the prosody and emotion of speech, dance movements of the body in response to music, and the fine facial movements that accompany speech.